Hack or just a coincidence?

This has happened to a friend of mine who can't access the internet now because of this problem:

My friend had a phone call from a guy claiming to be from Microsoft (to him it sounded like an Indian call centre - no offence meant by that he couldn't understand the guy very well).

The guy ("from microsoft") read out a long number that was unique to his laptop. Then he told my friend that he had quite a lot of problems on his laptop and then the guy on the phone managed to bring up a box on the laptop screen showing all these "problems".

The guy on the phone said that to fix all these "problems" it would cost my friend £85 to have all the problems solved or he lose everything on his laptop.

He is now locked out of his laptop and can't get on it with a configuration code.

When he loads up his laptop it loads up a black screen a box (that looks like it's from windows 95, but his laptop has windows 7 as the main OS) which asks for this code.

The strange thing is that he received the phone call on his house phone and they knew his full name.

Is this a strange situation or does this happen when you've done something you shouldn't have?

This is an old old scam and I am really surprised that your friend has not heard of it. Easy enough to get names and addresses these days.

But that aside providing your friend did not download anything the 'Microsoft' guy asked him to or allow him access via some remote software then it looks like an unfortunate coincidence.

So we will need to know if your friend did anything the guy wanted him to do.

By the way I could go on any PC in the land and bring up a box, usually Event Manager and show you what looks like problems, most of these are no big deal but I admit can look a bit daunting, with their red/yellow triangles, to the less informed.

So if you can provide as much info as you can we might be able to get your friends PC back up and running.

then the guy on the phone managed to bring up a box on the laptop screen showing all these "problems". Sounds as if he's allowed the guy remote access so he has most likely installed some malware.Can your friend get into safe mode(by tapping f8)and uninstall any programs that shouldn't be there then run malwarebytes or whatever antivirus he has installed

hiwatt: that might have got lost in translation, so to speak. When they called me, the guy talked me through how to look at Event Viewer - he didn't actually do it himself.

Viowithcrailtap: you should be so lucky. It's the people Chronos doesn't answer that I feel sorry for... :-) I'm hoping it is just a coincidence: in all the many instances I've heard of this particular scam, I've never known the scammer to actually screw the machine - it's always been about getting the money.